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Why must beauty be pain?
Why do so many beauty practices, especially for women, necessitate pain?
From teeth sharpening of the mbenjele, to feet binding in imperial China, to injections and fillers in today’s world.
Some practices can be explained (although, to me, not justified). Such as squeezing oneself into corsets to achieve an ideal waist-to-hip ratio, since evolution perceives a WHR suggesting high reproductive health to be attractive.
Others are arbitrary standards of beauty that pass with time. The suffering and permanent damage far surpass the constructed ‘attractiveness’ it promises.
Many of these painful practices, I have concluded, are a way to signal exclusivity, commitment, wealth, and thus social status. I.e. only when you have the money to survive do you have excess left to spend on fillers. Only the privileged in imperial China bound their feet, for they have access to medical services that ensure their survival after, and servants to carry out the multitude care it requires.
Even the teeth sharpening of mbenjele, I believe, is a sign that one is ‘committed’ to this arbitrary, but community-defined standard of beauty. The pain is an offering and sacrifice to show one’s extreme devotion to societal standards.
And it made me think of allll the things we are insidiously influenced – or even pressured – to do to our bodies. I look in horror at pillow faces of who were the most beautiful celebrities. Fillers moving about in faces. Starting skincare or facial augmentative therapies that are the norm these days, but finding oneself unable to just stop going for them any longer.
Anyway, I have made myself a vow. That I will not cave to needing to maintain my appearance or youth.
Firstly, I have never been known for being attractive anyway, so why is it of such importance? I’m no celebrity or influencer. As long as I’m keeping my base level of hygiene and am put together, all other preservations or augmentations are unnecessary.
Secondly, and something I’m very grateful for, is that my husband makes me feel undoubtedly attractive – to him! Which i think all husbands should do. As long as those who love me, and are worth my consideration, are content with my appearance, why should anything else matter?
Thirdly, I want to start practicing the mindset that it is okay to age, to not look ‘as good as I did before’. To be alright with my face and body changing and not what I used to deem ideal. Undo the ingrained anxiety of ‘not looking good’ by digging deeper and asking ‘so what?’
I want to be a happy old person, to embrace aging. Not someone inching with dread towards the inevitable of more wrinkles and white hair. Why, really, does it matter so much? If the people who love you still love you? Who are we really trying to impress, or keep up appearances for?
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An ode to spaces lost
Gillman Barracks
Exactly 5 years ago, a second date that started everything.
Galleries, a young artist who paints with a mirror (“the way you spot imperfections is through inversion”).
That strange short film we watched on deflated beanbags.
Discovering Handlebar. Every weekend a hike and dinner. Those familiar voices behind masks revealing a face through the years.
That day K gave me a ring, I spent the whole night watching it sparkle under the strung-up lights that have illuminated so many of our evenings.
Pearl’s Hill Terrace
My first internship. Climbing up rooftops for a break. Those moss drenched greek statues and abandoned office chairs.
Tacos al fresco, tall minty cocktails, picnics in the park.
Dance classes, hen’s day, up the wet hill with heels for our wedding dance.
An eclectic mix of flyers — tarot, improv, French, pottery, stuffed squirrels.
Memories clattering with impatience even as I rush to create more of them. The cling clang of de(con)struction to come. Massive beaks that paint old things a shiny chrome.
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Movie Review: Leave the World Behind
It was an extraordinarily rainy day and night in the usually sunny Singapore, a perfect time for a chilling horror film. We settled on the thriller Leave the World Behind. Boy I was not ready for the ride I had unwittingly strapped into.
Some context: I have consumed my fair share of Thai, Korean, Japanese, and American classic horror, with little trepidation. I’ve watched the supposed scariest of scary — The Exorcist — and LAUGHED because its iconic scene was so comical.
This film genuinely scared me silly.
[mild spoilers here] And in the absence of ghosts / spirits / demons, the supernatural, jump scares, gore, or even a classic antagonist to appear on screen.
So why was I shaking in my seat? Because everything that transpired in the film was eerily likely to happen in our reality, and every day our reality seems to inch forward towards theirs.
The horror films that have hit hardest with me are always ones about cults, because cults exist and the horrorific acts they commit very real. That is why Rosemary’s Baby, Midsommar, and the likes, were masterpieces in my books. Yet even they, hinged on the possible, have a measure of gore and explicit assaults by baddies.
In LTWB, the core events started and are happening off-screen. In this contained, still somewhat safe, perimeter, you are watching aftershocks: leaving you to imagine the full extent of horror and the impending fate of our protagonists. Think Bird Box or the Quiet Place, but more removed, and on the other end of the disaster (before, not after).
You watch the city crumble in a distance and part of the anguish is sitting at the knife-edge between hope, and the growing realization that the inevitable is heading towards you. (Or, maybe it won’t?)
[Mild spoilers] The scene in which an oil tank approaches the shore, first indifference, then ignorance, then the dawning realization of danger — perfectly sums up the family’s (and their individual) reaction to what’s happening.
Leave the World Behind had excellent pacing. For the first half of the film, tension is pulled to just the right taut. The parallel escalation to a climax, drawn by each groups’ adventures, was exquisite.
It built up sufficient clues, yet left enough ambiguity in the first third, leaving room for many possibilities; resolving them patiently and neatly as the story unfolds, without contrivity. You have to pick up the links yourself, it never hits you in the face.
I love also that characters and their narratives were kept consistent. An possible apocalypse is no time for 180° change in character, but aspects of their personalities that are latent in everyday life may manifest — they did, and did so believably!
The camera works, sound design, and directorial choices were – i’m running out of positive descriptors – par excellence. I appreciated that the director brought back the ‘horror score against silence’, ‘slow zoom-ins for a suspense’. It was incredibly well done, standing out as a stylistic enhancement, when it could easily have been jarring if done wrong.
Other directorial highlights are the strange phenomenon of animals, jets, ships — these large-scale abnormalities reminded me of the best and creepiest parts of NOPE.
Most of all, LTWB had a certain restraint that many new movies lack, in a time where blockbusters are prone too BIG, DRAMATIC moments to top predecessors.
This restraint lent a rawness and realness to the characters and their responses to the world, and is why it was terrifying.
Besides that, I loved Ethan Hawke in this film. Never knew he was such a funny guy. He plays his role as naive professor well and every micro expression and action was spot on. I couldn’t help liking his character immensely, he makes me laugh, even when unintended, every time he’s in the scene!
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Book Review: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
50 years after it’s publication, The Dispossessed remains relevant as ever. Le Guin presents to us a world of anarchy — not dystopian chaos as the word has come to connote (itself telling in our world’s mistrust of decentralization) — but a functioning society without centralized rule, not without its failings.
Le Guin writes with shocking clarity of what a viable anarchy could look like through the eyes of Shevek, a theoretical physicist in anarchic Anarres. Perhaps the true genius lies in her clever juxtaposition with Urras, a capitalist society not unlike ours, to which Shevek travels.
I can do no true justice to this novel through an analysis, and will instead share some choice observations of Shevek, a view of our society through the eyes of a true anarchist.
On anarchic Anarres:
“He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution — a permanent one, an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear or punishment and without hope of reward: act from the centre of one’s soul.”
“But what keeps people in order? Why don’t they rob and murder each other?”
“Nobody owns anything to rob. If you want things you take them from the depository. As for violence, well, I don’t know; would you murder me, ordinarily? And if you felt like it, would a law against it stop you? Coercion is the least efficient means of obtaining order.”
On capitalistic Urras:
“He had not been free from anything [in Anarres]: only free to do anything. Here, it was the other way round. Like all the students and professors, he had nothing to do but his intellectual work: literally nothing. The beds were made for them, the rooms were swept for them, the routine fo the college was managed for them.”
“The matter of superiority and inferiority must be a central one in Urrasti social life. If to respect him [an Urrasti] had to consider half the human race [women] as inferior to him, how then did women manage to respect themselves—did they consider men inferior? And how did all that affect sex-lives?”
Rated 5/5
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Book Review: I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
By the recommendation of a dear friend, I picked up this compact novel — a delightful morsel I devoured in two days, putting me in a mood that lasted for even more.
A reviewer described this as a ‘pastoral dystopia’, which is a succinct, accurate description of the setting. I say ‘setting’ specifically, than ‘genre’, because its true genre stripped of the sci-fi cloak, is that of humanness and humanity.
At its core, it is about finding meaning: what it means to be human in context of others, within a community, and especially to be a human woman. It is about how memory, hope, loss, loneliness, and death informs this search.
The dystopian setting is but an excellent vehicle and vessel in the exploration of these themes. The plot is driven by the whats, hows and whys. The characters and reader alike are kept desperate to know the truth of what led to their present. Rather than tiresome philosophical musings of ‘humanness’, these questions naturally arise in the more tantalizing and concrete search for clues on what had happened in this post-apocalyptic not-Earth.
It is a tightly written novel, every word serving their purpose. And in its simplicity of prose, the depth of our narrator’s frustrations, joys, and aloneness rings clear — a note of tragedy you cannot rid of in your head after.
Harpman meticulously constructs a world that gives the nostalgia a unique flavor: the narrator always had enough for survival. There was no real, explicit danger. She experienced and witnessed love and companionship, she had a vague concept of a ‘normal life’, though always second-hand and beyond her comprehension. She had a community for most of her life, yet it was fragile, tenuous, and steadily frittering away.
The implicit confusion, longing, and displacement of the unnamed narrator is reminiscent of Kathy H’s yearnings in Never Let Me Go (to be human, woman, loved). And the other 39 women and their opaque, not quite reachable memories of a past life? They are a neat parallel to one of my favorite post-pandemic wasteland fics, Station Eleven. If you liked either books, you will likely enjoy this title.
I recommend listening to the Carpenter’s rendition of The End of The World as you read, or after you read this. It will do a number to your heart.
Now if you have a masochistic streak and want to sink into the sublime pit of dystopian nostalgia (yup, join the gang), try also Anyone Who Knows What Love Is, a choice pick from one of the earlier Black Mirror episodes.
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To read a good story
It is after 26 years as a self-professed avid reader (after my first self-read book at 5, on the Teletubbies), that i made the stunning revelation that I do not, in fact, love to read. It is a good story that I love.
Before I go into the catalyst for this realization, let’s comb through the various clues to this I should have picked up.
This is why I spend hours on Reddit, disregarding my husband’s scoffing that these supposed happenings are ‘not real’. So what? I’m in it for the story.
This is why I find personal blogs just as absorbing as novels – if not more so – because they have the additional allure of being real, and raw.
This is why I relish reading Wikipedia summaries of book and movie plots.
This is why I read primarily fiction. The skill of reading was developed out of mere necessity owed to my thirst for stories.
This is why I can and have read tons of research papers and non-fiction, but each is one too many because they are, truly, a spectacular yawn and a half to me.
Why then don’t I love other forms of story-telling as much? Why do movies and shows, or even audio books, not hold as much intrigue? I think it is because I love so much a good story that their re-telling must be borne solely out of my imagination to be perfectly as I want it to be imagined. It is not the effects, the acting, the screenplay that moves me, but the core of it; the story. I watch something onscreen when I want to enjoy one of those. When I want a story, I read.
Now back to the catalyst. At dinner just awhile ago, K alludes to a story he is reading in enticing bits and pieces. I know neither the context, the middle, nor the end. I instinctively knew this was a juicy morsel of a story, I felt that tang of anticipation of my tongue I get when I sink into a story I just knew would be good: ironic, surprising, teasing, satisfying.
Experiencing a deep envy that I could not ‘have’ this story (it is written in Polish), what came next was a self-reflexive understanding of my lust for the story. Not just to have something to read, but to have this story be told in an exciting, immersive way.
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Book Review: Lies and Sorcery by Elsa Morante
A slow, passionate, depraved, descent into madness.
Elsa Morante is a master at writing characters to life: each of them with their secret desires and fears unspooling like tangled yarn, knitted together into a quilt of inextricable insanity.
And borrowing from her genius, our dear, ‘poor’ Elisa – by-product and narrator of the insanity – inherits the masterful metafictional writing of Elsa in her own retelling. At no point of her narration did I doubt the necessity of Elisa’s enervating and painful detailing of her memory.
For those brave enough to venture forth into this complex multi-generational family drama, let it be foretold: the last two parts (400 pages long) felt like being trapped in a fever dream; a dream in which you descend an infinite and illusory stairwell that never ends and is the same as the last turn.
Yet, it all made sense in context of Elisa’s position and motive: while Elsa is an ingenious writer (and cannot be forgiven were she the narrator), Elisa is decidedly not one. This is the reason I not merely tolerated, but perversely relished, the spiraling labyrinth of delirium that spanned 300 pages when it could have been 3.
I love flawed characters, and in this novel you will be hard-pressed to find a single character not flagrantly flawed. I surprised myself by finding the capacity to be heartbroken for some of them (namely Francesco, Alessandra), and noted that this is not a reflection of any redeeming qualities they may have, but the depth of cruelty others’ flaws have flagellated them by.
Indeed, this is a story about heartbreak, cruelty, delusion, derision, and obsession disguised as love. I loved it, docking one star only because I feared that if it were 2 pages longer I would have myself succumbed to lunacy.
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Popo, Eih Eih
the way i bite into a too-sweet coconut candy and remember to call my grandma. “Popo buy for you!” exclaims Eih Eih, each time. Not in her native tongue, her words belie the urgency to express another’s love.
i imagine she thinks about her mother, back home, humming a Burmese tune that threads through her string of sisters on a straw-stuffed bed. “She prays every night,” my grandma tells me.
Left unsaid, the ponderance of devotion. My Popo in a bone-wearied gait down the aisle for the right brand of candy; Eih Eih on her knees, palms in a pious convergence; the sweet crunch between my teeth that bids me dial that eight digits i’ve worn into numerous keypads for two decades past.
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